Humiliation (Pride and Prejudice)

Why does Elizabeth have to go through the humiliation of public ridicule over Lydia’s elopement before she can win Darcy? Why did he not tell her at Lambton when the news of the elopement first arrived that he would resolve the issue for her and save her months of grief?

Why does Darcy have to go through the physical humiliation of going to London, searching for Wickham and negotiating with him to marry Lydia, paying him in fact to become Darcy’s own future brother-in-law Why wasn’t his reversal of behavior at Pemberley and the explanations offered in his letters to Elizabeth sufficient to win her?

In Framley Parsonage, Why did Mark Robarts have to undergo the humiliation of watching the bailiffs inventorying his property for seizure before Lord Lufton arrived in the knick of time to pay his debts?

In each case we can only conclude that the intense physical experience was necessary to bring about the reversal of attitude, the regret or humility at a deep subconscious level required to evoke the positive response from life.

Elizabeth needed to completely acknowledge to herself the vulgarity of her family inheritance and feel the real gratitude for Darcy’s offer of marriage. She had to compensate for the ‘genius’ in her that took joy in offending him by being offending in her own consciousness.

Darcy had to physically work out his repulsion to Mrs. Bennet’s consciousness and his social abhorrence for mixing with it, before he could truly and fully accept Elizabeth as she is, as an individual, and renounce the social attitudes of the period which condemned her for what her family was.

Mark Robarts had been elevated to a high level by his relationship with the Luftons, yet used it to assert and aspire for greater importance, turning his back on their generosity and asserting his independence, as if the accomplishment had been all his own. He needed to experience in the depths of his being the humility born of humiliation. He had to wipe out the egoistic attitude that had been the source of his trouble, before life could come to reestablish the harmony at a higher level.

In all these instances it was ego that became the obstacle to progress and converted opportunity into problems. Humiliation is the eradication of the false values of ego so that the true values of the deeper individual can emerge and express themselves.